Over the past year, we’ve seen an emerging trend among big business clients. It’s disturbing, this trend, because it points to the fact that a lot of businesses believed the SEO hype and didn’t pay attention to what the actual practitioners were saying. So we’ll say it again. SEO is not the end all, be all of online marketing. It’s a layover point on the way to success; not the final stop.

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Google was granted a patent on Blog Search, and how the search engine might filter blog posts out of blog search based upon a number of factors. The patent was originally filed in 2006, and it’s the first patent filing I’ve seen from Google that uses the term “splog.” The screenshot from the patent below shows some of that potential filtering process

A lot of people will tell you about the tactical details of managing a search program (and by “search” I’m referring to paid and natural search, not just one or the other). Some will tell you about the strategic details. Very few will talk about the financial details.

Two recent cases of AdSense publisher bans highlight publisher discontent about Google’s mysterious methods for determining when to ban (and when to reinstate) participants displaying its Content Network ads on their sites.

What kind of skills do search engine optimizers need to succeed in today’s marketplace? Should SEOs be siloed into doing just SEO and close themselves out from other marketing skills? Or should the new kind of SEO should be jack of all trades and also the master of all trades?

Analysis of Advanced Web Ranking and Screaming Frog. You could do the same thing with exports from similar tools; but these two in particular are absolutely fantastic and have definitely become part of my daily work, so for the purpose of this example I’ll be talking focusing on them.

To understand how Google became the world’s most popular search engine, think of it as a giant vote counting machine. That’s why there’s so much attention these days on Google’s competition with Twitter and Facebook. They’re the new, popular ways that people are voting for things they like, casting ballots that Google can’t easily count.

If you use Google, and I know you do, you may have noticed a little banner popping up at the top of the page announcing: “We’re changing our privacy policy and terms.” It gives you the choice to “Learn More” or, another option, the one I’m betting most people followed, to “Dismiss.”
Who wants to read about what Google plans to do with all that information it has about us?

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Last month, market research tool provider Ask Your Target Market surveyed 400 US adults about their attitudes toward personalized search on Google. The results were reported today in eMarketer’s email newsletter. We went back to the source to check out the survey and discovered that the majority of respondents expressed ambivalence or outright dissatisfaction about Google’s new more personalized search results.

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Google Search Plus Your World (GSPYW, for short). Social media belly button lint? Or the best damned thing since chocolate? It’s a riddle.
But GSPYW builds traffic a bunch of ways. The best (so far) is the ‘Plus Box’:

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Pinterest is the hottest young site on the internet. In the past six months, the social sharing tool has gone from effectively non-existent to one of the top 100 sites on the web (and is on track to break into Alexa’s Top 50). Pinterest’s traffic charts aren’t hockey sticks– they’re rocket ships.